The March
By E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 363 pages, $25.95
In an unself-conscious moment in his “Memoirs,” William Tecumseh Sherman, scourge of the South and a man comfortable with the concepts of total war and scorched earth, relates a routine night’s stopover at a plantation. It was late January 1865, after the burning of Atlanta and his sweep to the sea and occupation of Savannah, and early in his ensuing chase through the Carolinas.
“I slept on the floor of the house, but the night was so bitter cold that I got up by the fire several times, and when it burned low I rekindled it with an old mantel-clock and the wreck of a bedstead which stood in a corner of the room,” Sherman wrote, “the only act of vandalism that I recall done by myself personally during the war.”
The precision and enigma of a mind that would distinguish vandalism from the context of slash-and-burn war sounds like something straight out of E.L. Doctorow’s new novel, “The March.” It isn’t, but then Doctorow’s attempt to capture this man and the grit and social texture surrounding his famous campaign reads like a vividly imagined counter life to Sherman’s “Memoirs.”
Doctorow has obviously read Sherman–he paraphrases the general frequently and appropriates some of Sherman’s observations in the novel’s scene constructions and descriptions, sometimes fobbing them off as the thoughts of other characters. But Doctorow’s intent isn’t mimetic. If anything, he tends toward the abstract when rendering Sherman’s thoughts, winnowing out the specifics of the general’s real-life prose.
Doubtless Doctorow has read U.S. Grant’s and Southern Gen. Joseph Johnston’s first-hand ac-counts of the war as well. What he is after is a kind of enfleshment of the past, to render it to the reader as a palpable, present experience so that, as a Union soldier with a head injury that robbed his memory complains in “The March,” “It’s always now.”
The historical Sherman, no shrinking violet, called his effort “one of the longest and most important marches ever made by an organized army in a civilized country.” Hannibal might argue the bragging rights, but Doctorow’s account makes clear the devastation of 60,000 troops trampling a 30-mile-wide swath through the countryside by viewing it from many angles. We see and hear from freed slaves, Rebel soldiers, the plantation-owning class, the Union infantry and cavalry, the war’s hangers-on, the populace caught up in great dislocations. And mostly offstage but still evoked is the power structure behind Sherman: Grant and the other Union generals, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and, in a cameo appearance, Honest Abe himself.
That this complex interweaving of perspectives and characters is achieved within the context of a giant metaphor–We’re all on a march, aren’t we?–is impressive. So the march as it appears in “The March” is writ both large and small, and many of its characters recognize the fact. Witness the exchange between Emily Thompson, the refugee daughter of a dead judge, and Wrede Sartorius, a gifted surgeon and colonel under Sherman’s command:
“I no longer find it strange to have no habitation, to wake up each morning in a different place,” Sartorius says. “To march and camp and march again. To meet resistance at a river or a hamlet and engage in combat. And then to bury our dead and resume the march.”
“I’ve lost everything to this war,” Thompson tells him. “And I see steadfastness not in the rooted mansions of a city but in what has no roots, what is itinerant. A floating world.”
It’s as if Sherman has imposed a new world order, effected a paradigm shift, so that even in its horror people are awakened to life anew. “On the march is the new way to live,” exclaims Arly, a Rebel soldier who crosses back and forth between Union and Confederate lines. And Union soldier Stephen Walsh contemplates:
“On the march there was no one place from which all others were measured. It was as if the earth itself rolled backward under one’s feet, it was as if the armies were strung from the floating clouds.”
And Doctorow himself, as the overarching narrative voice, says that “to someone watching the procession of men and wagons and gun carriages, broughams, buggies, and two-horse shays, it became apparent that not merely an army was on the move but an uprooted civilization, as if all humanity had taken to the road.”
Certainly the newly freed slaves took to the road, with “a rhythmless festive sound that came up from them,” and the march out of slavery is a thematic and plot concern that Doctorow infuses everywhere, like the smoke of battle. Deserting the plantations, former slaves create their own army of sorts, trailing after Uncle Billy, as Sherman is called by his troops.
Doctorow presents the historical reality–Sherman tried to cut himself off from these people for strategic reasons but faced censure for attitudes hostile to blacks–with nuance. And at the level of character, he has the former slaveowners and the onetime slaves grapple with what freedom will mean.
Mattie Jameson, who fled the plantation she and her husband owned, “knew, of course, that there might never again be slaves but she couldn’t quite see how anything could be done without them. And so when she imagined the war over and a return to their home, as often as not in her imagination the slaves would still be there.” Pearl Wilkins James-on, the castoff daughter of Mattie’s husband by a slave, soliloquizes to her father’s corpse:
“I can promise no man will ever treat me like you did my mama, nosir. . . . She goin far, your Pearl. She will take your name to glory.”
With Pearl we may be reminded of Jefferson and the commonality of mixed-race children in a plantation setting, so this teen who appears nearly white and bridges the North-South divide by becoming a drummer boy in the Union ranks isn’t the cross-dressing historical stretch that she might first appear to be to readers. She speaks in dialect, something common to, say, Mark Twain, and that is a little unexpected. But she’s one of the durable characters in “The March,” and Doctorow is clever with his history, skewing it for dramatic effect but simultaneously retaining the tang of its origin in fact.
History has always been Doctorow’s muse and his playground, of course, from the Red-scare era of “The Book of Daniel,” to Tammany Hall New York in “The Waterworks,” to the infant years of the 20th Century in “Ragtime.” In “The March,” however, he may have found his apogee, and again, Sherman’s “Memoirs” shed light on Doctorow’s novelistic technique.
The meeting in which we see Abe Lincoln with Grant and Sherman in “The March” really did take place, for example, aboard the steamer River Queen. But whereas history has the testimony of Sherman and Vice Adm. D.D. Porter, Doctorow gives us the cynical, war-weary surgeon Wrede Sartorius, a fictional character who, on sighting Lincoln, reveals that the president “had the weak, hopeful smile of the sick,” and is shocked to find “this was not the resolute, visionary leader of the country whose portrait photographs were seen everywhere in the Union. This was someone eaten away by life, with eyes pained and a physiognomy almost sepulchral.”
Incidents like this abound in “The March.” While the historical Sherman did receive a note from the head of a convent or school in Columbia, S.C., asking for special protection, we know little else of the situation. In the novel she is christened Sister Ann Marie, and Walsh heroically leads her and her charges through the flames of the burning city to safety. It makes a better movie, after all.
The plot of “The March” is beguilingly simple: an army marches, and people die. “It’s a happy war, this,” a cheerful Union soldier named Clarke tells us early on. Clarke leads the sort of foraging party–the men called themselves “bummers”–for which Sherman was famous. “We do not leave a new civil government behind us,” Clarke explains. “We burn the country and go on.”
Not much further into the novel, he’s dead, and one of the admirable aspects of “The March” is that while some characters survive its entirety, a great many do not. The exit may not always entail death, but the sudden twisting of the path by Doctorow echoes well the caprice of war and the general vagaries of life.
Wading through a swamp in battle at one point, Walsh finds it “a resistant thing with a life of its own, and in [his] mind it was not Union or Confederate but its own nameless kingdom and, as far as he could see as he pressed forward in the kind of plod it demanded, it went on forever.”
The human condition, the march, call it what you will, it is the novel’s real protagonist. I think we see Doctorow clearly when Sartorius tells Thompson, “You must not reduce life to its sentiments,” and reflecting, she replies:
“I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr. Sartorius. I enlarge life to its sentiments.”
